LONDON // David Cameron, the UK prime minister, faced increasing pressure to allow in more refugees from Syria Thursday after British newspapers’ front pages were dominated by a photograph of a dead child on a Turkish beach.
Mr Cameron, said Wednesday that “I don’t think there is an answer that can be achieved simply by taking more and more refugees,” found himself under attack from MPs in his own Conservative Party, religious leaders and the opposition Labour Party. Britain has taken 216 of the estimated four million refugees from Syria under its “vulnerable persons” programme.
“Britain has always been a generous, open and welcoming country, and we must not let the tough political climate of today allow us to step away from that tradition,” the former Conservative Party chairwoman Sayeeda Warsi told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, e, comparing Britain’s response to its record of helping Jewish children fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s.
“We have to be prepared to share the burden.”
Mr Cameron, who said during a visit to a camp for Syrian refugees in Jordan in 2012 that “we have got to do more,” argued Wednesday that the best solution would be to bring “peace and stability” to the region.
The Sun newspaper, which backed Mr Cameron’s re-election in May, used its front page to tell the prime minister that “summer is over” and called on him to act on “the biggest crisis facing Europe since World War II”.
The majority of national newspapers highlighted the same photograph, showing the dead child being carried away from the beach by an emergency worker.
Tory MPs told the BBC that Britain should take more refugees, while Vincent Nichols, head of the Roman Catholic church in England and Wales, said Britain’s and Europe’s response is “a disgrace”.
Andrew Mitchell, the former international development secretary, defended Britain’s record, saying it is doing more than other European countries to assist refugees in the region.
“We’re providing an immense amount of humanitarian support in Syria and to people who’ve come across the border,” Mr Mitchell told the BBC. “The important thing is that the burden should be shared across Europe.”
* Bloomberg News
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